"Shifting the Gaze: Painting and Feminism" Exhibition
The Jewish Museum
This event has ended.
Over the past fifty years, feminists have defied an art world dominated by men, deploying direct action and theory while making fundamental changes in their everyday lives. Shifting the Gaze: Painting and Feminism explores the widespread influence of feminist practice on the styles and methods of painting from the 1960s to the present. The provocative paintings on view here embody the tension between individual expression and collective politics, between a traditional medium and radical action.
While not a survey of Jewish feminist art, Shifting the Gaze is drawn primarily from the collection of The Jewish Museum, and features seven new acquisitions from the past three years. Some art historians have argued that Jewish
feminists are particularly attuned to sexuality, radical politics, and injustice because of Jewish involvement in modernism and leftist politics. Indeed, Jewish painters have played decisive roles in founding and sustaining major feminist theories and art collectives. This exhibition explores how social revolutions take place not only in the realm of ideas and politics, but in style and form.
Shifting the Gaze is organized into six sections: self-expression, the body, decoration, politics, writing, and satire. These topics reflect the variety of styles and forms that individual painters, often working within activist groups, created to challenge viewers to rethink memory, home, art history, and ritual, and to confront
anti-Semitism. Some of the paintings address issues specific to women artists, such as the representation of the body or the legitimacy of craft and decorative arts, while others address social issues that galvanized radical protest. As seen in these works, feminist painting generated new ideas and challenged old ones, shifting the gaze to encompass women’s history, experience, and material culture.
Since the 1980s, The Jewish Museum has supported the work of feminist artists through acquisitions and exhibitions in all media. To offer a historical framework for Shifting the Gaze, the curatorial staff is creating a list of over 550 women artists, from Renaissance Italian weavers to contemporary video artists, who have been represented in special exhibitions at the museum since 1947.
[Image: Hannah Wilke "Venus Pareve"]
Media
Schedule
from September 12, 2010 to January 30, 2011